So far this year the Press Complaints Commission has resolved eleven complaints against bad science and health coverage in the national press. Of those, seven involved the Daily Mail or Mail on Sunday. They range from the serious to the daft:

23rd February - The Daily Mail's belief that a super-volcano is going to blow up Germany (an event that could severely depress house prices in the Home Counties) clashes with reality and loses, forcing the article to be removed.

17th February - The Daily Telegraph retract a number of inaccurate claims about accuracy from a hatchet job on the Met Office, burning fields of irony meters in the process.

15th February - The Daily Mail amend an article claiming "that eating cake could lead to excess hair," noting helpfully for their readers that, "the claim under contention had been made by an expert on hirsutism, and not by a nutritionist."

12th February - The Daily Mail score a huge victory in their campaign against the green energy tax burden, when the PCC helpfully points out that some of it doesn't exist.

19th January - A Daily Mail report claiming that "the Liberal Democrats voted to legalise cannabis and decriminalise all other personal drug use at their party's conference" is attacked with the Tipp-Ex pen when it turns out that the vote was imaginary.

17th January - The Daily Mail (again) are pulled up for misleading statements about haemophilia in a clusterfuck of an article that ultimately led to the Managing Editor writing a letter of apology to the parent of a child with the condition, "expressing regret for the distress that the coverage had caused," and to MailOnline purging all reader comments from the page.

6th January(and again) - Both The Independent and Metro are caught out for making claims about a supposedly-new drug that turn out to be untrue.

6th January - The Daily Mail find themselves hastily backtracking on the dodgy claim that "smoking cannabis has been found to be a major cause of psychotic illness."

The most recent ruling - not yet up on the PCC website at the time I write this - concerned coverage of the HPV vaccine in The Sun, The Daily Mail and Metro. You can see all the gory details at JDC's blog or TabloidWatch, but in a nutshell: several newspapers lent undue weight to unsubstantiated claims that the cervical cancer vaccine put a child into a 'waking coma'.

In its ruling the PCC attacked misleading headlines and made the following comment:

The Commission emphasised the importance that newspapers take adequate care when reporting on health issues to present the situation in a correct and clear light. This is due, in part, to the potential effects misleading information may have on readers' decisions in regard to their health. It was clear in these cases that the newspapers had roundly failed to take the required care with their headlines not to mislead readers.

Bad science reporting isn't just an irritant to nerdy pedants like me, it's something that risks people's health and undermines their ability to make informed choices. The PCC's recent statement suggests that they understand this, which makes it all the more frustrating that their rulings on the stories above - merely the tip of the bad science iceberg - were so weak.

Sure, boxes were ticked and compliance requirements were met. One story was taken down and several had amendments added to them at a later date, but by then the damage had been done. Thousands of people who read these articles may now have unwarranted doubts about the cervical cancer vaccine, or be afraid to touch a child with haemophilia, and that is serious damage that can't easily be undone.

Errors happen - we all make them, and journalists shouldn't be pilloried for them - but often these stories form part of a wider pattern of seriously flawed coverage. The Daily Mail's treatment of the HPV vaccine is a particularly notorious example, best illustrated by a sample of stories I collected from their British edition back in 2009:

A heady mix of scare stories then, but the most shocking part is that even as these stories were being published, the Daily Mail's Irish edition were running a campaign in favour of the vaccine:

Note: sadly the links I collected in 2009 no longer work - if you put the headlines into the Mail's site search engine you can still see them in the results, but weirdly even the links there are broken. I've included them here in case they suddenly start working again.

When the same company is simultaneously publishing stories both attacking and supporting a vaccine, it seems to me they have a serious ethical issue on their hands. Irrespective of your views on vaccine safety the two sides can't both be right, so the company risks at least one editor taking a stance that could harm public health.

It's a risk borne more by the public than the newspaper, and it's hard to see how the dual coverage fits with the PCC's concern "that newspapers take adequate care when reporting on health issues to present the situation in a correct and clear light."

Then there are those who seem to doggedly cling to false claims despite all evidence to the contrary. The author Richard Wilson has documented a torrent of nonsense produced from the keyboard of Christopher Booker over the years, including dozens of articles in which the columnist outlines a sort of grand conspiracy to make asbestos seem more dangerous than it is.

His assertions were backed up by mess of claims that included: the false suggestion that the Health & Safety Executive had declared white asbestos to hold 'insignificant' risk; offensive remarks about Michael Lees, who lost his wife to cancer linked to asbestos exposure; and a ludicrous suggestion that white asbestos is, "chemically identical to talcum powder."

Wilson complained successfully to the PCC and secured a correction - but only after seven months of effort and an initial reply from the Mail in which a managing editor bizarrely accused him of being, "allied to a well-organised and well-funded commercial lobby [who] stand to benefit financially [from the] the anti-asbestos campaign." You can read the whole saga here, but it's worth repeating Wilson's assessment of the Press Complaints Commission:

"Rather than take ownership of the process, assess the various bits of evidence and come to a judgement, the PCC instead asked me to go through this new set of claims and produce a further response. Here I began to see why so many people have given up on the PCC. If a newspaper digs in its heels and simply denies all the evidence that's been presented, there doesn't seem to be much that the PCC can do except bat the issue back to the complainant."

"In the end we won, sort of. The newspaper agreed to make some amendments to the text of the article, publish a short correction, and write a private apology to Michael Lees over Booker's comments about his wife. But to get even this far has taken seven months, and a substantial time investment, while the Daily Mail seems to have been able to drag the process out with impunity. "Free", perhaps – but hardly "fast", or "fair"."

Risks and consequences are at the heart of this problem. When a newspaper prints demonstrably false claims about a vaccine, the consequence for the reader is that they may be misinformed, or even suffer damage to their health. The consequences for the wider public could include loss of herd immunity, reduced confidence in vaccines due to circulating rumours, or economic costs associated with greater rates of sickness.

The consequence for the newspaper that published the claim is unlikely to be more than a slap on the wrist and a request to publish a brief explanatory note. If the last few decades have taught us anything, it's that when the public are more exposed to a company's actions than the company itself is, bad outcomes are never far away.

At the start of his inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the British press, Lord Leveson expressed a particular interest in looking at concerns over science reporting. I'm not sure what the solution is - and it's critical that whatever it is it doesn't prevent journalists challenging scientists - but examining this imbalance of consequences seems like a good place to start.